Hello Reader,

True crime is a popular topic in media today. You’ve probably seen a Dateline or 48 Hours, two true crime programs with over thirty years on-air, or heard about a popular podcast like Serial. (Ben Franklin’s World listeners might be relieved to know true crime ranked below history podcasts in popularity according to a 2022 survey.) But crime isn’t new, nor is human's fascination with it. Keep reading to learn about a once well-known 1789 murder spree in Kentucky, and how it helps us understand the less-than-idealistic effects of the American Revolution.
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Today, Katherine Grandjean tells us more about this bloody moment from her new book, Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution. Katherine is an Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. Here’s Katherine to introduce us to the Harps and what their actions say about post-Revolutionary America.

Tell us about your book in two or three sentences. What's the big story you're uncovering?

Kingdom of Devils tells the story of a series of murders in Appalachia—a string of killings committed in the late 1790s by two brothers, Micajah and Wiley Harp. Although the murders were once notorious, no one has ever explained, really, why they happened. In trying to solve that mystery, the book uncovers darker and more violent legacies of the American Revolution than we usually acknowledge.
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What first sparked your interest in this topic?

I had long sensed that the Revolution’s aftermath wasn’t quite as bright a picture as we think, that people did not simply move on easily with their lives, and that it took a long time for things to settle in the wake of independence.

Then I stumbled onto this story accidentally. I had never heard of the Harp murders. But once I found the tale, I couldn’t put it down. Not only was I sucked into the riddle of how to understand these two men, I also realized that, by recreating their world, I could paint a somewhat different portrait of the early republic—more uncertain, more precarious. And one that would set our traditional stories (like John Adams’s presidency and the Louisiana Purchase) alongside the experiences of anonymous, unsung men, trying to eke out a living in the borderlands, in places like East Tennessee.
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What's one surprising or little-known detail you discovered in your research?

It’s all little-known! Surprisingly, although they are now mostly forgotten, the Harps were once very famous. Herman Melville mentioned them in the opening scene of The Confidence-Man: He called them “thugs.” William Faulkner conjured “the legend of the mad Harps” in Requiem for a Nun. But since the nineteenth century, their memory has faded. So I really felt like I was recovering a long-buried, but very American, tale.
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Why does this story matter for understanding the early American past or the present?

It matters for understanding both. This story casts new light on the post-Revolutionary years. In so many ways, the Revolution was not only liberating, it was also very destabilizing. So, along the way, I explore how that was true: the chaos it created in property markets, the difficulties people faced as they rushed westward to claim land (and confronted the Native peoples who already possessed it), all the social and political change of a historical moment that was both promising and dislocating.

But this story also felt uncannily resonant to me, as a twenty-first-century American. The Harps are like a prism for our times. I see them as an origins story of a certain pattern of violence that is still with us. Their spree is a clue that young American men have long been using violence to declare their dissatisfaction with American society. That’s not entirely new.
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If you could invite readers into one scene from your book, what moment would you choose and why?

Here’s how the book opens: On a frosty December day, a traveler named Thomas Langford shuffles into a dark tavern in Kentucky. There, he meets two men, then gets drunk with them. He has no grasp of the danger he’s in. This isn’t just the prelude to a murder: It also speaks to the growing anonymity in American society in the late eighteenth century: Who do you trust? Who are the people you’re meeting, not only in urban America but also in rural backcountry places? The mood of this book is tense, uncertain, and eerie, and I try to put my readers into some of those moments of contingency in the republic’s early years.
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What's one historical source, artifact, or place you'd recommend for readers who want to explore this topic further?

I don’t know if I can choose… To piece together this story, I went to dozens of places, from Constitution Square Historic Site in Danville, Kentucky (where you can see a replica of the jail where the Harps were once held) to the old Natchez Trace in Mississippi (which is where the story ends). Here’s an idea: True aficionados can read the first printed account of the Harp murders in James Hall’s Letters from the West (1828). As he floated down the Ohio River in a keelboat in the 1820s, Hall collected stories from Kentuckians about the early western settlements, and his writing is full of fabulous, colorful lore.
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Where can readers learn more about your work?

Look for me doing various local events this summer and fall, and I’ll be a featured panelist at the Mississippi Book Festival in September. You can also tune in online for my talk at American Philosophical Society on September 18. And, of course, you can buy my book at the Penguin Random House website, and at many great, local indie bookstores like Parnassus Books or Square Books.

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🎧 Go Deeper

Check out these episodes of Ben Franklin's World to discover how crimes can highlight important aspects of life in early America.

🎧 Episode 354: John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America​

🎧 Episode 389: Nicole Eustace, Indigenous Justice in Early America​

🎧 Episode 225: Elaine Forman Crane, The Poison Plot: Adultery & Murder In Colonial Newport​

🎧 Episode 370: Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches​

🎧 Episode 080: Jen Manion, Liberty’s Prisoners: Prisons & Prison Life in Early America​

💬 Join the Conversation

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Thank you for reading and considering.

Have a great week,

Liz Covart

Host, Ben Franklin's World​